Page 68 of Sweet Ruin

Three full days pass in blissful idleness.

On Christmas Day, I sleep until two in the afternoon on the office cot, eat a sleeve of saltines, binge Love Island, and take a lengthy nap in the early evening, just because I can.

I’m highly useful on the 26th. I clean the walk-in from top to bottom. I pull every shelf, scrub every gasket, mop every inch of floor, and throw out a container of pastry cream from October that has developed signs of alien lifeforms.

I then eat a sleeve of saltines, binge more Love Island, and take yet another lengthy nap.

The 27th is basically the same. A few overdue chores, and then a few overdue hours of doing whatever the hell I want. The midnight doughnuts taste almost as good on day three as they did when they first came out of the frying oil with Kane.

It’s actually mind-boggling how weird this solitude feels. My phone has been off since I walked out of my mother’s living room. I turned it off and stashed it in the glove box like a gun I didn’t want in the house.

Why wouldn’t I? Nothing good can come from answering it. I have no interest in talking to my mom, or Vivian, or Connor, or any of the billion family members who will pretend to be “checking up on me” when in reality they want to know what the hell I was thinking.

So: off, dark, silent.

Gotta protect your peace, as the girlies say these days.

On the downside, it does mean that the only voice I’ve had for three days is my own.

And that’s been going in circles.

Some of those circles are quite ugly. Objectively speaking, my life as I once knew it is kaput. Marriage? Family? House? Gone, gone, gone. If I let myself drift too far in that direction, it gets a little depressing.

A few of the other circles are quite violent. I got my revenge on Connor and Vivian; I aired the receipts.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not still prone to the occasional fantasy of dangling them upside down from the Empire State Building for a while.

So those are some of the rabbit holes I’ve been going down.

And then, every single time when I least expect it, the rabbit hole bends and goes someplace it has no business going.

Green eyes.

Snow in a doorway.

A frosted thumb on my cheek and then in his mouth.

Goodnight, Lilah.

That’s the other downside of the no-phone policy: Kane can’t reach me there.

Nor has he come by here. For three days, I haven’t heard a word from him. No call, no visit, no hooded men on the corners or ominous black sedans idling out front. I keep telling myself that’s a relief.

But even the nutcases on Love Island would call me delusional for saying that.

By the afternoon of the 27th, I’ve run out of chores, which is how I know the vacation is over. Also, the holiday weekend has come to a close, and life is sort of starting to resume outside these walls.

That’s for the best—an idle Delilah is a dangerous creature. The less thinking I do, the better.

Also, I’m out of saltines.

So it’s time for me to re-emerge from my hibernation.

I’m stubbornly keeping my phone off for now, though. I use the ancient, Y2K-era desktop in my office to look up lawyers in the area. If I’m going to get properly divorced, I need someone who knows how to do the paperwork.

But therein lies the problem.

Pickings are extremely slim.